The first legal and ethics advisory board (LEAB) meeting for the AETIONOMY project took place in hanover on 10th October 2014. The distinguished board members included Richard Ashcroft, Professor of Bioethics at Queen Mary, University of London, Cecilia Magnussen Sjoeberg, Professor of IT law at Stockholm University, and Brecht Claerhout, Director of the data security specialists, Custodix (Belgium). The meeting was also attended by the patient groups Alzheimer Europe and European Brain Council as well as the project joint-coordinator UCB.
The AETIONOMY project is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a joint undertaking between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA. AETIONOMY aims at a new “mechanism-based taxonomy” disease classification system, based upon the knowledge about the biological pathways involved in the aetiology of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease to guide the classification of disease classes and subclasses.

At the European, Middle Eastern & African Society for Biopreservation & Biobanking (ESBB) 2014 Annual conference, which took place in october in Leipzig, Dr. Marc Stauch delivered a paper on Informed Consent Issues in Biobanking. For further information see www.esbb.org and www.esbb.org/leipzig/download/speakers/5A01_Stauch.pdf.